Amazon founder Jeff Bezos often talks about humanity starting again on other planets. But a new project funding Amazon workers’ sci-fi writing is imagining how life could be different right here on Earth, in a world without corporate overlords like Bezos.
The establishment of the first Amazon union in the US is a historic breakthrough for organized labor. The successful union drive shows how the Left can best build real grassroots power: by organizing in the workplace.
Organizing Amazon workers is both an existential challenge and an opportunity for labor. But the company’s cash advantages and operational flexibility mean that traditional union tactics won’t be enough. We need strategies that combine disruption and scale.
Amazon labor organizer Chris Smalls and Starbucks organizer Jaz Brisack talk to Jacobin about racist union busting, being invited to the White House, and how genuine human interaction is the key to workplace organizing when the boss treats workers like robots.
Let's call Amazon's cancellation of its New York City headquarters what it was: a capital strike. It's a demonstration of why we must overcome capitalists' power over investment.
Jay Carney went from being Barack Obama’s press secretary to being Amazon’s top flack. But PR is only part of his job — his larger mission is to help Amazon ruthlessly exploit its workforce so it can expand endlessly.
Starbucks and Amazon are running parallel union-busting campaigns across the country, willfully violating labor law in a desperate attempt to defeat nascent worker organizing in their companies.
The National Labor Relations Board has repeatedly ruled that Starbucks and Amazon’s union busting is against the law. Yet both companies seem intent on continuing to flagrantly break labor law in the hopes of breaking their fledgling unions.
Staten Island Amazon workers endured thunderstorms, racism, and arrests to organize in break rooms, bus stops, and grocery aisles to win their union — and one of the world’s most powerful companies couldn’t stop them. Here’s how they did it.
In 2020, Joe Biden pledged to ensure that companies would only get federal contracts if they remained neutral in union elections. But Amazon was just reawarded a $10 billion federal contract — despite the corporation’s vile union busting.
Amazon doesn't have a website for the Czech Republic, but it has created a distribution hub in that country in order to process orders for German customers. The site was set up amidst protests by German logistics workers — and today, their Czech colleagues are earning just half the wages.
Through creative actions and cross-border solidarity, Polish workers are undermining Amazon's anti-union playbook.
In more and more of the country Amazon acts like an employer in a company town, sucking up whole communities and shaping public goods and services to fit its profit-making needs.
Amazon won the majority of ballots cast in the union election by the company’s warehouse workers in Bessemer, Alabama. There's no way around it: the result is a major setback in the fight to organize one of the most powerful corporations on the planet.
We're in the midst of an uptick in union organizing in the US. But that organizing can't turn into permanent gains for workers without a functioning National Labor Relations Board. And the board is suffering from a severe underfunding crisis.
This May Day, don’t hang your head for the labor movement’s defeat. US unions are weak, it’s true. But there’s more excitement, more of a spirit of militancy and experimentation, and more hope in today’s labor movement than there has been in a long time.
In 1886, workers came together on the original May Day to demand an eight-hour day. Today, from Starbucks stores to Amazon warehouses, that struggle continues.
New York governor Kathy Hochul has the power to crack down on Amazon and help Amazon Labor Union workers get the contract they deserve in Staten Island. But her ties to the union-busting retail giant might get in the way.
A federal official has recommended that the results of the union election at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama warehouse be thrown out and a second election be held, due to the company’s illegal anti-union tactics. It’s a step forward for the essential task of organizing one of the world’s most powerful companies
Last year, the Teamsters attempted and failed to unionize Amazon in Alberta, Canada. A reporter working for Jacobin and Ricochet went undercover at an Amazon warehouse for almost five months and witnessed firsthand the challenges put to the Teamsters’ union drive.